John Porcellino's Sam

It was June 23, 1998. I was (and still am, even if it is completely dead now) subscribed to Usenet's comix@ mailing list. I fondly remember it even if, as usual, my www persona quarreled a lot in there. One of said list's regular features was Read This Comic under which members reviewed what they considered to be, well... comics worth reading...

John Porcellino is an important small-press creator who self-publishes King-Cat Comics and Stories - John told me just yesterday that issue # 69 will be available soon: check it out! His great graphic novel Perfect Example was published by now defunct Highwater Books (2000); La Mano published Diary of a Mosquito Abatement Man in 2005; a huge King-Cat retrospective was published in 2007 by Drawn & Quarterly.

If you remember James Kochalka's diatribes against craft you'll understand John Porcellino's DIY punk aesthetics (late eighties, early nineties). As time passed his drawing style evolved into a highly stylized, very simple, Zen-like minimalism.

As for Read This Comic, here's my contribution with minor changes (it was June 23, more than ten years ago; the last phrase is my touchstone to recognize greatness):

Sam is a story self-published by John Porcellino in the mini-comic King-Cat Comics & Stories No. 38, dated March 1993. Sam is short for Porcellino's she dog's name, Samantha Love. This story is about what she meant to him through her own life, his childhood, adolescence, young adult's years.

Porcellino's drawing style is what we could call minimalist: the characters are just diagrams and there's almost no backgrounds; shading doesn't exist and the lines have always the same thickness and shaky quality; there's almost no perspective (when it exists it's used with deliberate "mistakes"). King-Cat's outdoor scenes usually show a great composition sense conveying a slow pace for the little characters who wander through the sketchy, but well balanced landscape. These melancholic panels don't appear in Sam though... This is an indoor and intimate story (one panel in page four is the exception). Porcellino's drawings have a roundness that conveys warmness. (Conversely, the troubled adolescent in page five has a saw-like hairdo: a symbol of rebellion as we can see in the character Calvin of Calvin & Hobbes' fame, or Bart Simpson of The Simpsons' fame.)

The characters are shown mostly as talking heads. The most elaborate compositions in the story are those in which Sam appears (Sam's the star of the show, after all). Porcellino uses an eight panel grid, the same one once used by Dell in their children's comics. This transports Western readers directly to the past, but, at the same time, gives us a regular pace (most panels have an equal, if shaky, shape) which, like the regular beat of a clock, goes on and on unto the inevitable conclusion of us all, living beings: death.

John Porcellino's writing is as simple and straightforward as his drawing style. The lettering combines capital letters and small letters in a bad-good way that, again, is in accordance with the drawings being also typical of punk aesthetics.

All through Sam we can see how John's love for his pet grows. During his difficult adolescent years Sam was always there for him. In the end we can understand his sorrow when she dies. A particularly deep panel is the one in which his friend of many years turns her back on him: Sam's there but, at the same time, she's not there anymore. Soon she will die of old age and old animals (the same way as old people) bid their farewells to this world way before their loved ones bid farewell to them.

One of Porcellino's poetical one pagers, 13 Stars, is an epilogue to Sam. In it she appears as a ghost: the ghost of memory, the ghost of lost love and all lost things. So are all true works of art: ghosts that haunt us in a disturbing way. I, for one, found that reading this story was a truly haunting and marvelous experience. Sam is so simple and sad, and, yet, so beautiful...

Image:

A 13 Stars version that I commissioned to John.

Chago Armada's Sa-Lo-Mon - Coda

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Images (1., 2., 3., 4., from El humor otro, 1963):

(1. "at noon the shadow hides under the man";

2., 3.): very simple figures convey a Leopardi type of humor;

4. Sa-Lo-Mon builds his own prison to escape afterwards using his imagination (more complex ideas were deemed too obscure to Fidel);

5. Chago Armada's painting Lo amorfo y descorazonador del diálogo vacío (the amorphous and disheartening of vacuous dialog), 1968: some of Chago's abstract paintings and drawings are clearly influenced by his comics, but not in a Neo-Dada, detached, ironical, "I'm an alchemist transforming lead into gold", kind of way. There is a very direct, very creative vein between the two (in these multi-tiered paintings with speech balloons I wonder if there's any difference). Until proven wrong I suppose that Chago Armada created abstract comics.

PS On second thought, maybe Lettriste extraordinaire Isidore Isou is also a contender.

Chago Armada's Sa-Lo-Mon

Considering that I have fluid criteria to "define" comics (I don't do that, really), it's obvious that I should have included Saul Steinberg in my first post (the mother of all that's following, to quote, you know who). There's sequenciality in some of his cartoons, if sequenciality is important to define the art form... Anyway, if Steinberg wasn't there, a great follower was: Chago Armada.

Santiago "Chago" Armada was born in Palma Soriano, Cuba, and was one of Fidel Castro's "guerrilleros" in the Sierra Maestra. It was there that he drew his first character: Julito 26, for El cubano libre. In 1961 he created "Sa-Lo-Mon" for Revolución newspaper. In 1963 he published his book El humor otro (another kind of humor) in which a few of his "Sa-Lo-Mon" strips and pages were republished. Considered too hermetical and, consequentially, too bourgeois, "Sa-Lo-Mon" was discontinued in 1963. The same thing happened to Rafael Fornés' "Don Sabino." Oy!...

There are two different phases in the "Sa-Lo-Mon" series: the poetical comic strip and the philosophical page. "Sa-Lo-Mon is a very simple caricature at first (he's the innocent naked human) to become a more sophisticated fool with a mask. The three syllables dividing the name Salomon are a conceptual, visual, phonetical mirror to the language of comics. With this series Chago Armada explored all things human: innocence, curiosity, scatology, wonderment, boredom, sexuality, etc... After finishing its life in comics, Sa-Lo-Mon fuelled Chago Armada's paintings (he really did abstract comics as early as the sixties). It's maddening that tons of ink and paper are wasted every day in order to publish mediocrities while this masterpiece remains completely unknown. Ry Cooder and Wim Wenders, where are you when you're needed?...

Image: an anti children's comics cartoon by another Cuban Steinberg influenced cartoonist: René de la Nuez (El caballo de Troya, 1984).

PS: A gallery of Cuban art showing some of Chago's paintings:
http://www.galeriacubarte.cult.cu/g_artista.php?item=190&lang=eng

Steinlen's La Vision de Hugo - Coda

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Images:

1. famous Steinlen Japoniste poster advertising the Chat Noir's tour;

2. bal at Barriere: like a reporter, Steinlen depicts urban life (his style and theme reminds Toulouse-Lautrec and the impressionists);

3. a French soldier on leave with a cane (during WWI Steinlen insisted on his Realist mode; his melodramatic tone - not seen here - was apparently also part of his cause defending).

Steinlen's La Vision de Hugo

Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, Théophile Alexandre Steinlen lived and worked mainly in Paris. A prolific illustrator with a remarkably naturalistic drawing technique Steinlen recorded bohemian Montmartre's proletarians' lives (he was a Realist at the end of the century, but some of his drawings can't avoid kitchy "oh, the humanity!" melodrama). He's mostly known today because of his black cat advertising Le Chat Noir cabaret (Steinlen loved cats, by the way). During WWI he did propaganda against the Germans, embracing interventionism in Serbia, for instance...

Here's a great site dedicated to Théophile Steinlen:

http://www.steinlen.net/main.php

Here you can read La vision de Hugo, for free:

http://www.assietteaubeurre.org/hugo/hugo_f1.htm

La vision de Hugo is a denunciation of colonialism. French writer Victor Hugo is seen here as the heir of the romantic high ideals defended by the American and French Revolutions. If that's what their vision was, this globalized blood bath is what they achieved. Steinlen saw the lambs being slaughtered by arrogant Europeans in 1902 (let's not forget that the Paris Exhibition two years before had an incredibly racist human zoo), but he couldn't foresee how the wolves would attack each other a few years later provoking an equally huge carnage.

Image:

a double-page spread in La Vision de Hugo published in L'Assiette au Beurre # 47 (February, 1902).

Jossot's Le Credo and Dressage - Coda

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stereotyping the Jossot way:

1. the officer and the soldier (the latter has to obey to the former who’s an idiot, of course);

2. the priests (a French saying states: “bête comme une oie” – stupid like a goose);

3. the policeman (he looks at us, poor citizens, in an angry way; he abides by the rules to the point of becoming a geometrical figure, a card in the deck of the powerful).

Jossot's Le Credo and Dressage

L'Assiette au Beurre (1901 - 1912) was a French anarchist satirical magazine. Great artists published their virulent words and drawings in the mag's pages: Felix Valloton, Kees Van Donguen, Frantisek Kupka, Juan Gris, Jacques Villon, are all important avant garde painters (from the nabis, Vallotton, to Fauvism, Van Donguen, to Cubism, the other three). This list would be impressive enough, but the best graphic artists of the age also published in L'Assiette: Benjamin Rabier (well known for his laughing animals, mainly for a certain cow linked to a cheese label), Caran d'Ache, Théophile Alexandre Steinlen (of Le Chat Noir fame), Adolphe Willette (ditto), Nadar, Gustave-Henri Jossot. Other contributors are not as well known as the above outfit, but they also deserve to be mentioned (a few at random; my excuses to all the others): Jules Grandjouan, Hermann Paul, Bernard Naudin, Aristide Delannoy, Louis Malteste, Ricardo Flores, Emmanuel Barcet, Auguste Roubille, Leal da Câmara. The latter is a relatively known, in his homeland that is, Portuguese cartoonist.

Here's a site dedicated to the magazine:

http://www.assietteaubeurre.org/

You can read Jossot's "Le credo", for free, here:

http://www.assietteaubeurre.org/credo/credo_f1.htm

Ditto "dressage", here:

http://www.assietteaubeurre.org/dressage/dress_p1.htm

I have a confession to make: I have a problem with humor in the arts. I firmly believe that art's purpose (apart from formalist concerns that must always be present) is to unveil some kind of truth. Laughter, as Charles Baudelaire said more than a century ago (1855) is satanical:
http://baudelaire.litteratura.com/?rub=oeuvre&srub=ess&id=27&s=1
Either we laugh for frivolous reasons or we laugh at someone's expenses. I would place satire above the innocent joke (if such a thing exists) no doubt, but a satirical caricature is always a simplification. If manichaeism and scope reduction is what bothers me in most mass art (children's comics included, of course) why do I like Jossot's satirical comics? And are they even comics at all?
Certainly there's no lineal story in "Le credo" (a lifetime is told in "Dressage"). This narrative form is often called a cycle. Modernism allowed other art forms to expand their limits. I see no valid reasons to deny comics such freedom. Plus: does a comic really need to tell a story (lineal or otherwise) in order to be called, a comic? I don't think so, and that's all I'm saying for now. As for disliking, up to a point, I must add, 99 % of what the comics milieu considers a canon of comics why do I accept Jossot's acrimonious rants against authority? Precisely because mass art tends to be tame (the masses accept what they already know a lot better) and Jossot's work has that kind of desperate energy that exists in a powerless cry. It approaches (being a moralist, he doesn't achieve it) Baudelaire's absolute comic: the grotesque. Also: like everybody else, I'm biased.
Jossot's drawing style owes a lot to Émile Bernard's cloisonisme and Art Nouveau's wavy lines. As all graphic artists at the time he also owes a lot to Toulouse-Lautrec. His drawings impose their presence as emblems. His thick lines convey stereotypes in a perfect way.

Image:
an anti-absinthe cartoon by Leal da Câmara.

PS I must add that, as I put it ages ago in Nemo, a humorist who laughs at his or her (our) own foibles and miseries is not satanic at all. I didn't know it at the time, but that's, more or less, what Giacomo Leopardi also said.